


circa '97…

by kinnoth



Category: The Libertines
Genre: Gen, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-06
Updated: 2009-09-06
Packaged: 2017-10-27 06:49:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/292820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kinnoth/pseuds/kinnoth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carl's hands are a series of long, fine bones held together by milk-fat skin...</p>
            </blockquote>





	circa '97…

**Author's Note:**

> lol cor i'm pretentious.

**the hands fic**

He wouldn't feel quite so silly for wanting this, he thinks, if just he'd had a poet's hands. Because Peter's never felt proportioned, always a bit ugly, his needle neck and moon face, heavy wrists and spine curved like a perpetual question. His hands though -- thick, blunt, widely knuckled -- likely take the cake. His hands swallow pens, defy paper: soft skin too porous to hold ink when he writes on them in that still-child's scrawl; collect dirt in shallow half-crescent arches, even when he makes the effort to pick them clean. He has labourer's hands, he thinks, especially when he's sitting there, slack-jawed in concentrated awe, having finally cajoled Amy's friend/flatmate/not-shaggin'-him-so-will-you-just- _piss-off_? into picking up his guitar and playing something for him.

Carl's hands are a series of long, fine bones held together by milk-fat skin and distinctly un-feminine calluses, and even with his striking looks (which Peter can appreciate, you know, 'cos he's not an insecure twat who goes around slagging on what's perfectly true) it's his hands that draw the eye to the inevitable conclusion that, this bloke, right, he's _meant_ to be a musician, _meant_ to cradle that guitar, 'cos you can't just put off God's designs like that, yeah?

Peter could fit both of Carl's hands in the palm of one of his, but knows that if he'd ever tried to, all those little white scars criss-crossing Carl's knuckles would make known how they'd got there. It's safer like this, with Carl's entire body curled into the curves a beaten old acoustic like they're the curves of a woman. His fingers flit idly across the strings, coaxing sound from the stillness like pebbles skipping across a pond.

'So what do you want to hear?' Carl mutters, distracted but grudgingly accommodating.

 _Anything_ , Peter wants to say, but substitutes it with, 'Whatever you want,' because open-minded as he is, boys don't say that kind of thing to one another, the kind of thing that implies the sort of eager desperation he feels whenever Carl is on that precipice of _doing something_.

Carl scoffs and stills and then, in a sudden decisive upstroke, launches into something strident and deliberately irritating, all mocking harmonies and aggressive chords. His fingers dig perhaps a little too firmly into the strings, Peter thinks, because they blanch under the nail in a way that looks unnatural and painful. The tune is short and fast, and Carl finishes it in the same terse impatience he'd begun.

'Another one?' he asks but hasn't looked up to see Peter's vigorous nods when he starts up again, something lower, slower, faintly familiar. Peter sways a bit - the melody is soothing and lullaby-sweet. He feels his eyelids drooping, wants to let them drop so that he can close out the lights and clutter and mess of the flat around him and just let the music flutter through him like a butterfly in his veins.

But this is Carl, prickly Carl, solemn Carl who he's only just met a week ago, and Peter doesn't know if he could find words to explain how much he enjoys him that wouldn't send Carl out of this room and quite possibly out of his life forever. Peter concedes he doesn't even really know the guy yet, but he has the feeling it would be a loss he wouldn't be able to brush off with a drink or a post-coital fag. So he settles instead for lowering his eyes, fixing them on the strumming crawl of Carl's right hand across the strings, when halfway through the second reprise, Carl begins to sing. Mumbled, jumbled words, self-conscious while probably half-unaware, Carl's voice is the reluctant sort of gruff, honeyed, completely divorced from his muffled speaking voice, and Pete wonders, incredulously, how it is that Carl's decided to go into _acting_ of all things, with a voice like that.

' _Think about that, why don't you_ ,' Carl mumble-sings, and it's then that Peter remembers where he'd heard this song, two years ago in a pub with some shite little band –

' _Eyes wide open, you thinking man_ ,' he replies and Carl glances at him, surprised, but not unpleasantly.

'You know this?' he asks, hands continuing on their ministrations. If anything were capable of making a guitar weep sound, Pete thinks, it would be those hands.

'Heard it once,' Peter says, smiling serenely. 'You were supporting the what's-it...'

'Fuckin' terrible, these lyrics,' Carl admits, trailing notes into a quavering riff. 'But our mate, Evan - he was our frontman - kept going on about the "repetition in the theme" or some-shit. Wouldn't let us touch anything.'

The song slows into a coda and Carl draws it softly to a close. Terrible song or not, there is reverence there for the act, and Peter can't take his eyes away. These are the hands of experience, accomplishment, someone who's done something with his life, never mind that he's nineteen - one year older than Peter just proves he's that much more alive.

'I can fix this,' Peter says, slightly breathless, 'if you'll show me how to do that.' Carl looks up, follows his gesture to the instrument in his lap, and Peter watches as a thaw takes hold of his expression of faintly chilly disinterest and begins rearranging his features until his lips (red, rose pink, Peter notices) curl into themselves and the corners of his eyes fold into a cautious smile.

'You figure yourself to be some kinda artist, Pete?' he says and before Peter can protest that atrocious generalization, it occurs to him he's being teased, that if he meets Carl's eyes now (blue, like pieces of sky, but with the heat of the sun behind them) he'd recognize fondness there, guarded but proffering. It is at this point Peter knows that he gets to take direct claim to Carl, no more of that second degree relation rubbish; Carl is his now, _his friend_ , and Peter can't help but feel a little giddy at this theft as he smiles back, beatific. His sister probably won't be too pleased.


End file.
